Tag: leadershipdevelopment

In March 2018 I started this leadership and continuous improvement blog because of my high passion on the topic, my experience, and a strong desire to help and coach others. What was an unexpected surprise to me was the personal challenge and development I received in the process. Learning about social media, what works, doesn’t work, interacting with others that read my posts, etc. In addition, I was blown away with the connections I made and the feedback received on the posts. At no time did I have any grand plan for where this blogging would take me other than to help others and to challenge myself.

Well, I’ve decided to take the next step. A big next step! I’d like to introduce a new company ‘High Performance Leaders Inc.’ (HPL) which was founded byScott Smith and myself. I left my position at Amazon to start this new company because of the passion I have for continuous improvement and the development of leaders. There is so much unrealized potential out there in people and organizations and our goal at HPL is to disrupt that condition!

A highly engaged and motivated employee is the most formidable weapon that an organization can utilize to compete and win. This depends on strong and committed leaders, an effective management system structure, and a culture based on respect, trust and performance. This September HPL is launching a comprehensive and practical skills development program that will provide senior level leaders with a core success factor; the skills to lead and develop a high performance organization sustained through the habits of an Effective Leader. This 12 month program launches this fall.

A highly engaged and motivated employee is the most formidable weapon that an organization can utilize to compete and win. An engaged and motivated employee is more focused on doing their work, more productive, and is more likely to have a better work and home life. However, less than 30% of an organization’s people fit this category. Less than 5% of organizations sustain high performance over the long term. One of the limiting factors may be your management system.

Here are a few simple steps to start to build a strong management system.

First, it is important to understand the purpose of a management system. In simple terms, your management system is in place to make sure you are dong the right things for your customers (or clients or patients). It does this by connecting everyone in your organization to your vision, strategy and big outcome measures to allow everyone to understand how they can impact the vision and connect to the big outcomes. The management system engages our humans through solving their own problems. The most effective way to do this is through ‘low tech, high touch’ planning and measurement white boards.

Here are the steps to start building or improving your management system:

1. Identify your customer and understand what value they need from you.

I find in a lot of cases, there is not a strong understanding of who the customer is. Your customer is who gets direct benefit or value from what you do. For example, in health care, the patient receives the direct value from the care they are given. If my role is a support operation in manufacturing, such as engineering that develops product drawings, it is the people who build the product from the drawings. If my role is production, I deliver value directly to the end customer for the product.

2. Understand how you can easily measure the value you provide to the customer.

Our customers are easy. They want simple things. They want their stuff NOW. They want it PERFECT. They want it WASTE FREE. They may also want a good experience during the process.

I recommend you start with NOW as it is the easiest. We should all have a plan to deliver what our customer’s need when they need it. My customer needs their drawings today to build their product. My patient wants to continue to get better. All you need to do is measure how well you delivered on your plan. I would also recommend using a planning white board to show your commitment to your plan.

3. Graph your results to understand how you are doing.

What does a good day look like? Did we have a good day? Typically it is getting done what we need to accomplish for our customer. If you started with NOW, on your next white board – performance board – graph how well you are doing. Measure for a few weeks so you can start understanding a longer term trend in performance.

4. Start understanding why.

Why did we not have a good day? If you did not have a good day and did not accomplish what you needed to do for your customer, start understanding the reasons that are blocking your performance. You should start seeing some recurring reasons. For each reason, understand how bad it is by adding a bar or Pareto graph under your performance graph to track the number of occurrences.

5. Run some experiments to make it better.

Once you have a good understanding of the reasons why you are not having a good day, start running some simple experiments to fix the problem. Below your bar graph, document the experiment and indicate when you started the experiment on your performance graph. This will allow you to see if the experiment had the results you hoped for. If it did, adopt this as a new why to do your work. If it did not ‘t, try new experiments until you learn what does work.

6. When you are ready, add your other measures.

NOW, PERFECT, WASTE FREE. Keep it simple and do not add too many additional measures. Fewer measures are better, but it is important not to have a lonely number so you need to provide some balance. For example, if you measure NOW, balance it by making sure you are also delivering what you customer needs PERFECT.

Remember – a strong management system is elegantly simple and is driven by the daily connections we make with our people.

Often people try to have more things, or more money, in order to do more of what they want, so they will be happier. The way it actually works is the reverse. You must first be who you really are, then, do what you need to do, in order to have what you want.

Creating a strong CI team culture does not just happen on its own, unfortunately! There are 3 crucial steps to create any culture and if any are weak, so will be the resulting culture. One or all of these steps are often overlooked, leading to a weak or undesired culture.

I recently resumed “Open Office Hours” whereby I have time slots in my calendar reserved for impromptu drop-ins or phone calls from anyone within my organization. During one of these conversations we discussed how to change a culture within an organization which prompted me to dig up a mental model I used years ago when creating the “Lexus Mindset” to launch the first Lexus plant outside of Japan. Since then, I’ve used this same model to create Continuous Improvement cultures in other organizations.

Values – The first step is to determine and align the organization with the values that are most important, and desired or necessary to have in order to meet the mission of the team or organization. These values need to be well defined and communicated to everyone within the team or organization.

Behaviours – Next is to identify the behaviours that each member of the team or organization should exhibit that demonstrates the values previously determined. These behaviours maybe different at various levels and positions within the team or organization based on the role or responsibilities.

Consistency – Everyone on the team must consistently demonstrate the desired behaviours. Organizations most successful with creating their desired and sustained cultures are those where the members actively correct and identify unwanted behaviours and show recognition and appreciation for the desired behaviours.

Only when the desired behaviours are consistently demonstrated, are the values re-enforced, which then creates the culture sought after. When the demonstrated behaviours contradict or are inconsistent with the values of the organization, the resulting culture will not be what was intended.

When we used this mental model to create the Lexus Mindset, we invested a great deal of time and discussion to determine the values we felt were necessary to meet our mission. Once these values were determined, we worked together as a team to establish the behaviours that all members of the team would need to have that would clearly demonstrate and reinforce our values. We then developed methods that we could both correct undesirable behaviours or recognize the sought after behaviours. We made it fun and engaging at all levels. I remember my team pointing out to me a few times, with a big smile on their faces, “Does this behaviour support the Lexus Mindset?”. It was actually powerful and was very effective in changing our behaviours towards the ultimate culture we wanted to have. Not only did it correct poor behaviours, but it also resulted in open discussions that challenged our old way of reacting or dealing with situations which facilitated a faster shift in our thinking and ultimately our behaviours. We won the prestigious JD Power Gold Plant Award that year for the highest initial vehicle quality within North and South America, which I don’t think would have happened had we not created the culture that we did!